Vol. 3 No. 2 (2026): Global More-than-Human Histories of Palms
Enclosure, Extraction and Unequal Care

‘Oil Palm Has Godfathers; Coconut Doesn't Have Mourners’: The Racialised Politics of Plant Health and Pest Control in Tumaco, Colombia

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  • Andrés Caicedo
Andrés Caicedo
UC Berkeley
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815935

Published 2026-09-16

Keywords

  • coconut palm,
  • oil palm plantations,
  • red ring disease,
  • bud rot disease,
  • picudo negro

How to Cite

Caicedo, Andrés. 2026. “‘Oil Palm Has Godfathers; Coconut Doesn’t Have Mourners’: The Racialised Politics of Plant Health and Pest Control in Tumaco, Colombia”. Plant Perspectives 3 (2):363-88. https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815935.

Copyright (c) 2026 Andrés Caicedo

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The South American Palm Weevil (Picudo negro) is my ethnographic entry point to study the racialised relations between oil palm and coconut palm in Tumaco, a municipality located on the Colombian South Pacific Coast. Oil palm agricultural scientists, small farmers and companies, and coconut palm experts and growers have blamed picudo negro as the primary culprit for the most damaging plant diseases affecting these trees in Colombia: bud rot disease (oil palm) and red ring disease (coconut palm). They have caused the near collapse of both oil and coconut crops in Tumaco. By following picudo negro's traces, this paper argues that plant health measures to treat coconut and oil palm diseases operate as racialised technologies. Even though oil and coconut palms in Tumaco share the fact of undergoing lethal epidemics, they have experienced ruin, death, mourning, treatment and reparation differently. While oil palm plantations have received much attention, care and research from experts and national institutions, coconut palm ecologies have experienced systematic abandonment. I thus examine how the salvation of the oil palm, as the most ‘promising’ national (mono)crop, entails the erasure and eradication of the black ecologies, agriculture and knowledge stemming from the coconut palm trees.

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